The Jesus and Mary Chain - Academy, Manchester 20/11/14

Jim Reid is squinting at the piece of A4 taped to the stage beneath him, roughly half way through tonight’s second set. You could forgive him for being a little harder of sight than he was when he was first performing these songs; after all, the album that makes up the bulk of tonight’s show, Psychocandy, is almost thirty years old. This is the only real concession, though, to the intervening years that The Jesus and Mary Chain will make tonight; everything else - the volume in particular - remains absolutely ferocious.

If Reid couldn’t see the setlist when the band were first touring in support of their incendiary debut, back in the mid-eighties, it would probably have been down to the fact that the stage was usually consumed by crowd chaos within minutes of the kick-off. Tonight, the band choose to “play the encore first”, with a twenty-five minute set of post-Psychocandy material opening proceedings. I’ve seen it suggested elsewhere that this is a nod to their notoriously short shows of yesteryear, but there’s certainly no replication of the mayhem; tracks like opener “April Skies” simmer with restrained tension, whilst “Revenance”, driven by an intoxicating wall of sound, is proof that even if later-period Mary Chain cuts took no less of an aggressive stance to the volume dial, they were paced a little more glacially than their debut, which never lets up.

That’s the case tonight, too, when the group return from a swift break to the iconic beat of “Just Like Honey”, half-inched from The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby”. Reid doesn’t introduce the female vocalist who joins them for the song’s refrain - presumably it was nobody as high-profile as previous live guests on the track - and once she’s gone, “The Living End” marks a serious upturn in pace. Key to the ruthlessness with which they rip through Psychocandy is Reid’s brother, William, on guitar; he remains quite literally in the shadows for most of the show, just his iconic Sideshow Bob hairdo allowing for identification of his silhouette. Instead, his guitar does the talking, screeching through the solo on “The Hardest Walk”, providing a brutal backdrop to “Never Understand”, and fizzing menacingly through “Something’s Wrong”.

The Jesus and Mary Chain are defined by the tumult that had characterised their career from the word go; they’ve turned in plenty of half-baked performances both pre and post-reformation, but they’re in full flight tonight. Everything’s done with an intelligent economy; clever visuals provide visual stimulation but don’t distract, audience interaction - which would break the trance that the noise has most of the crowd in - is practically non-existent, and the sheer level of volume is breathtaking; My Bloody Valentine, who took so many of their cues from the Mary Chain, played half a mile away last year and didn’t get close to this level of aural savagery. “That’s it,” says Reid nonchalantly as ‘Game Over’ flashes across the stage at the conclusion of “It’s So Hard”; with further Psychocandy dates booked for 2015, though, you wonder whether the revival of their debut might be the unlikely trigger for a full-on renaissance.